February 2014 – code.openark.org

The 2014 MySQL Community Awards event will take place, as usual, in Santa Clara, April 2014, during the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo (currently scheduled at Thursday, April 3rd 2014).

The MySQL Community Awards is a community based initiative. The idea is to publicly recognize contributors to the MySQL ecosystem. The entire process of discussing, voting and awarding is controlled by an independent group of community members, typically based of past winners or their representatives, as well as known contributors.

It is a self-appointed, self-declared, self-making-up-the-rules-as-it-goes committee. It is also very aware of the importance of the community; a no-nonsense, non-political, adhering to tradition, self criticizing committee.

The Call for Nominations is open. We are seeking the community’s assistance in nominating candidates in the following categories:

MySQL Community Awards: Community Contributor of the year 2014

This is a personal award; a winner would a person who has made contribution to the MySQL ecosystem. This could be via development, advocating, blogging, speaking, supporting, etc. All things go.

MySQL Community Awards: Application of the year 2014

An application, project, product etc. which supports the MySQL ecosystem by either contributing code, complementing its behaviour, supporting its use, etc. This could range from a one man open source project to a large scale social service.

MySQL Community Awards: Corporate Contributor of the year 2013

A company who made contribution to the MySQL ecosystem. This might be a corporate which released major open source code; one that advocates for MySQL; one that help out community members by… anything.

Continue reading » “MySQL Community Awards 2014: Call for Nominations!”

I happen to use stored routines with MySQL. In fact, my open source project common_schema heavily utilizes them. DBA-wise, I think they provide with a lot of power (alas, the ANSI:SQL 2003 syntax feels more like COBOL than a sane programming language, which is why I use QueryScript instead).

However I wish to discuss the use of stored routines as integral part of your application code, which I discourage.

The common discussion on whether to use or not use stored routines typically revolves around data transfer (with stored routines you transfer less data since it’s being processed on server side), security (with stored routines you can obfuscate/hide internal datasets, and provide with limited and expected API) and performance (with MySQL this is not what you would expect, as routines are interpreted & their queries re-evaluated, as opposed to other RDBMS you may be used to).

But I wish to discuss the use of stored routines from an engineering standpoint. The first couple of points I raise are cultural/behavioural.

2nd grade citizens

Your stored routines are not likely to integrate well with your IDE. While your Java/Scala/PHP/Ruby/whatnot code comfortably lies within your home directory, the stored routines live in their own space: a database container. They’re not as visible to you as your standard code. Your IDE is unaware of their existence and is unlikely to have the necessary plugin/state of mind to be able to view these.

This leads to difficulty in maintaining the code. People typically resort to using some SQL-oriented GUI tool such as MySQL Workbench, SequelPro or other, commercial tools. But these tools, while make it easy to edit your routine code, do not integrate (well?) with your source control. I can’t say I’ve used all GUI tools; but how many of them will have Git/SVN/Mercurial connectors? How many of them will keep local history changes once you edit a routine? I’m happy to get introduced to such a tool.

Even with such integration, you’re split between two IDEs. And if you’re the command line enthusiast, well, you can’t just svn ci -m “fixed my stored procedure bug”. Your code is simply not in your trunk directory.

It can be done. You could maintain the entire routine code from within your source tree, and hats off to all those who do it. Most will not. See later on about deployments for more on this. Continue reading » “Why delegating code to MySQL Stored Routines is poor engineering practice”